The City Has Always Known Who It Is

Before the BET Hip Hop Awards. Before Tyler Perry Studios. Before the Trap became a global genre. Before "Atlanta" was a cultural shorthand understood worldwide — Atlanta knew it was something different.

The Atlanta History Center knows it too. And they've been archiving the proof for over a century.

The Explore Black Atlanta exhibition — drawn from the Kenan Research Center's vast collections — is one of the most significant public displays of Black Atlanta's photographic history available to the general public. It is not a monument. It is a mirror. And what it reflects is extraordinary.

What The Photographs Hold

The exhibition features 29 curated photographs spanning nearly a century of Black Atlanta life — from a 1944 wedding portrait of a couple whose groom served in World War II, to a 2020 fist bump between Reverend Dr. Raphael Warnock and Andrew Young on the day that would change Georgia's political history forever.

Each image is a document. Each document is an argument. The argument is simple: Black Atlanta has always been building something.

"Atlanta History Center collects, preserves, and provides free public access to historic documents, photographs, and other material preserving the stories of African Americans in Atlanta."

That mission is evident in every frame on display.

The Icons, the Institutions, the Everyday

What makes this exhibition powerful is its range. It doesn't just celebrate the famous. It honors the fabric.

Yes, there's Maynard H. Jackson Jr. — photographed at his 1974 inauguration as the 47th Mayor of Atlanta, the first African American mayor of any major Southern city. The man who forced the city to award 35% of its contracts to minority-owned businesses. The man whose name now graces the world's busiest airport. Standing there in that photograph, young and immovable, you can feel what was about to change.

And there's Muhammad Ali — photographed outside Atlanta City Hall in 1970, the year Georgia State Senator Leroy Johnson helped him reclaim the right to fight after being stripped of his title for refusing the Vietnam draft. Atlanta gave Ali back his platform when no one else would. That's not a small thing.

But the exhibition also lingers in the everyday. A baptism ceremony at a pond — no date, no names — just community and faith gathered at the water's edge. The Davis-Cooper wedding of 1944, identified only by their surnames, the groom one of over 2.5 million Black Americans who served in World War II. These images remind us that history is not only made by the famous. It is made by all of us.

The Institutions That Built the Foundation

Several photographs in the exhibition document the Black institutions that have long been Atlanta's infrastructure of excellence — and the engine behind so much of what the city has become.

Booker T. Washington High School, which opened in 1924 after Black voters were instrumental in passing the school bond that funded it, stands as proof of community power. Its alumni include Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Lena Horne, and Dr. Louis Sullivan. The building is on the National Register of Historic Places.

The Atlanta Life Insurance Company — founded in 1905 by Alonzo Herndon, a formerly enslaved man who built a barbershop empire — is captured in a circa-1940 photograph of its Auburn Avenue offices. That building, too, is on the National Register. Atlanta Life became a cornerstone of Black economic independence, not just in Atlanta, but nationally.

The Atlanta Black Crackers baseball team, photographed at Ponce de Leon Park in 1938, draws its roster from the HBCUs of the Atlanta University Center — Morehouse, Morris Brown, Clark College. The team disbanded after Jackie Robinson desegregated Major League Baseball in 1947, but the image of those men in uniform at Ponce de Leon carries everything.

Spelman College. Morehouse College. Their homecomings, their chapels, their choirs. Paul Robeson performing at Sisters Chapel in 1942, singing "Ballad of Americans" — a song about ethnic and religious unity — with the combined choirs of Morehouse and Spelman. That photograph alone is worth the visit.

Selena Sloan Butler: The Name You Should Know

Of all the photographs in the exhibition, one stands as a particular reminder of how much of Black history remains unsung.

Selena Sloan Butler, photographed circa 1895, founded the National Congress of Colored Parents and Teachers Association — the nation's first Black parent-teacher association — at Yonge Street Elementary School in Atlanta. In 1964, that organization merged with the white National PTA. Today she is recognized as one of the founders of the entire PTA movement.

She built something that outlasted segregation. And most people have never heard her name.

That is precisely why this exhibition exists.

The Warnock Photo and What It Means in 2026

The exhibition closes — and opens — with a photograph taken in 2020: Reverend Dr. Raphael Warnock and former Mayor Andrew Young, fist bumping at C.T. Martin Natatorium and Recreation Center after casting their votes in the Senate runoff election.

Warnock won that election. He became the first African American to represent Georgia in the U.S. Senate — and the first Black Democrat elected to the Senate from a former Confederate state since Reconstruction.

Andrew Young was in that photograph. A man who marched with Dr. King. Who served as Ambassador to the United Nations. Who was himself mayor of Atlanta. Standing in a rec center on a Tuesday in December, fist-bumping a pastor from Ebenezer Baptist Church — Dr. King's own church — who was about to make history.

The photograph is a circle completing itself. It is everything the exhibition is about.

How to Experience It

The Explore Black Atlanta exhibition is on view at the Atlanta History Center in Buckhead. The Kenan Research Center's full photographic collections are also available for public exploration — an extraordinary resource for anyone interested in the documented history of Black Atlanta.

Note: Admission to the Atlanta History Center Buckhead campus is currently sold out through April 12 due to high demand for the Freedom Plane National Tour exhibit running simultaneously. Plan ahead and book your tickets early.

If you're Black and you're from Atlanta — or if you love this city — this exhibition is not optional. It's required. It's your history, your receipts, your proof.

Go see yourself.